The purpose of this blog is to explore different places that spirituality intersects my daily life; from what it truly means to LOVE your neighbor all the way to how the newest movie,song,or tv show that I have experienced confronts spirituality rather intended or not.

About Me

I LOVE God, I have been married for 5 years to a wonderful woman, I am a recent college graduate of Lakeland college with a degree in Religious Studies,I have currently foregone going to Seminary, but feel called to work with teens and young adults and do so at my local church, Vineyard CC, in Grafton, WI.

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Friday, April 6, 2012

LOVing gamES

I have to be honest, my wife and I arrived a little late to “The
Huger Games” party and actually only read the books because we saw the movie
preview and wanted to see the movie. Then based on the urging of some of my
friends, I borrowed the first book and became hooked. I kid you not I finished
reading it in two days and if you truly know me you know how fast that truly is.
This occurred the same week that the movie would grace the screens and if I
wasn’t motivated enough to read through the entire series as fast as possible,
the movie lit a fire under me that I have rarely had when it comes to the
written word. Now, typically I would avoid such a hot topic to write about, or
wait for the buzz to blow over before I talked any topics I felt moved to bring
up, just I had done with “Harry Potter.” However, with the end of Holy Week approaching
fast I can’t help but lay down my thoughts because where I see God in this
movie parallels how God works within the passion story.

I want
to start by establishing an understanding between us. When you read the books
or watch the movie you have to recognize that our characters live under a
unique reality. The FACTS of their reality are dictated by an imperialist type regime.
They are denied information and forced into acts that some would not otherwise
participate in if not for the regime’s supposed power. As the details of the
story unfold the characters discover that what they had once thought was FACT
was actually changeable or not applicable for every person within Panem.
Through their growth and the bending and manipulating of these supposed facts
our heroine and her friends discover that which is TRUTH; those things which
cannot be manipulated and become dependent on the perceptions of the observers. For instance, the fact that the Capital was
all powerful and able to kill whomever they wanted was proved false. Where the
TRUTH was that love was such a powerful act, that of Rue’s, and Peeta’s, and
even Katniss’s, that it turned the tables of the capital’s power.

So long
as we can agree on these definitions the rest of this blog will make sense. You
see, it is those things that hold true that are the most easily relatable to
the story of Jesus. Take for instance the truth that love is greater than
violence. Katniss showed Rue, whom was
her enemy, love and kindness that is relatable to the same love that Jesus
showed the Roman centurion whose ear was sliced off by Peter, stopping a bloodshed
that could have taken many lives. While Katniss did not always answer with the
same pacifistic nobility the Jesus demonstrated for us and calls for us to repeat
within our lives, she still showed love and cared for more than one of her
enemies.

You cannot
ignore the violence itself as a character representative of a relative fact.
That fact is that, right now, we live in a violent world. Violent acts are responded
to with more violent acts because of thinking that brute force will change the
outcome and bring upon peace, yet we ignore the truth that Jesus, as I stated
above, calls for us to love with reckless abandon and forgive in the same manner.
It is this core truth that sparked the movement called the way that we now call
Christianity. This is not to say that it is true that we can love in such a
manner of our own accord, after all it was God incarnate whom demonstrated
these acts. Instead what the truth that
I am trying to illustrate is that God walks with us through this struggle loving
with us, allowing us to not have to try to do this on our own. We can see this
demonstrated in “The Hunger Games” through the mutual love of Peeta and Katniss
and how it was that love that turned what the Hunger Games represented on its
head, turning a fact into fiction and proving the capital fallible.

When
Christ rose from the dead on Easter he too turned the facts of this reality
into fiction and proved that the rule of man is fallible compared to the love
of God. The living Christ walks with us to help us love each other. When we
accept this truth then our reality shifts and those things that we thought were
true are reveled as being dependent upon our perspective and only temporary
facts.

What other truths do you find God speaking to you in this
story or others?